Sci-Fi Aircraft Sound Design

I’ve been on a bit of a science fiction fix recently, after working on my latest sound redesign (find it here) I’ve been constantly thinking about designing sounds for use in sci-fi games and for post production purposes. I’ve also been getting well acquainted with Spark, an ensemble for Native Instruments Reaktor. It’s a powerful synth, and really well suited for sound design purposes too.

I wanted to create some alien aircraft / spaceship sounds that could be used for flybys and such so I opened a fresh Logic project and got cracking.

Obviously working on science fiction sound elements means you can get a little extra creative with the sounds that might emanate from alien aircraft and this is always lots of fun. Spark offers lots of modulation possibilities and automating these along with more standard parameters such as pan, EQ and gain was the majority of the work in these sounds.

I created a patch which sounded a bit engine like and features lots of grumbly noises and used automation to move between this and a screamy noisey layer created using the ring mod / filter.

As well as Spark I loaded up my ‘DATACompiler’ tool that I created in Reaktor (read more here)

DATACompiler is great for strange textures with a digital edge, I opted for the ‘Doom’ preset I’d created and used the cycles control to modulate some internal LFOs via some automation as you can see in the picture above. This gave the craft a bit of a ‘whirring’ character.

Final touches included gain automation, convolution reverb and some pan automation to establish the aircraft’s location relative to the listener. Listen below!